There used to be a show called LUCAS TANNER around 1974 which was quite like this. Except rather than Brandon and his cool hair it had David Hartman in the title role. If you don't remember him, Hartman was about as cool as a pre-Global Warming Al Gore. He fought for all kinds of liberal ideals and 'understood the kids'.

This had the unintended effect of turning you off things you believed in, much like when you were a kid and your parents told you that they liked a song from your favourite band. Death knell.

Mr Bolling understood the miscasting of Lucas with a square in a turtle neck and has more or less given us Keith Partridge (David Cassidy) in the role, which is what anyone under 30 in that era would have done.

Well done, sir!

Yeah, THE HOLIDAY is pretty bad. Unfortunately the audience I saw it with, laughed at all of Meyers half-baked "truths" about middle-class love. So, I think her box-office-friendly mediocrity will be with us for some time.

What I find interesting about both the movie and this thread is the notion that films of the past from a similar genre, and their stars, were better than what we have today. And, yeah, of course they seem that way. But we have to allow for context.

As much as I love watching Styanwyck, Russel etc; those women with "gumption" (as THE HOLIDAY would have it), they don't play characters that work in a modern context. The joy of seeing HIldy be better and brighter than the boys in the newsroon in HIS GIRL FRIDAY is that it is set in a pre-feminist society. All the feisty, sparky stuff was contingent upon the times. This is why the sexiness of another genre - film noir - is almost impossible to replicate. It has a "use-by" date.

It's actually a good thing they don't make 'em like that anymore, because it denotes where some things in society have improved.

So I think the answer to better Rom Coms than THE HOLIDAY probably doesn't lie in imitating the past, no matter how much we love those old movies.

Or just have a hiatus for say, three years? And in that time we could re-tool or perhaps even forget agout the sitcom and create another way to fill those 22 frenzied minutes.

Yes, there are different senses of humor. And some things certainly are funny to me rather than others (see, I paid attention to the letters up-thread).

But many sitcoms are woefully derivative, which is one of the main features of the pain-o-meter - to remind us of the many times we've seen crud like this before.

I can't respect TWO AND A HALF MEN and ACCORDING TO JIM because they seem to have absolutely no new ideas. The first appears to be the ODD COUPLE with a cutesy child a la FULL HOUSE and the second is in the style of RAYMOND, KING OF QUEENS et al - the hot wife with emotionally detached lazy husband.

Sure the fruadience and the real audience find them funny, but some of us find their familarity stifles the laughs. And its our right as channel-grazing humans to demand newness and differentness.

2010. The year we bring back the sitcom!

Agreed. Its a nice point that we unite to decry Paris.

My beef is that some people, young girls in surveys, think she's a role model.

Trouble is that you can't aspire to be an heiress unless you choose your parents very carefully.

A number of responses have posed variations on, "Why are professional writers so thin-skinned and precious?". Part of the answer is this: unless a letter writer is responding out of some profound personal experience - writing about a death in their family in reply to article about grieving, for example - a lot of on-line letter writing is the result of minutes of thought.

Paid writers live with what they write for weeks or sometimes months beforehand. It occupies at least a corner of their mind continually prior to publishing. Their relationship to what they write is formed through living with it. A piece of that writer goes with the story. This is simply not the case for most letter writers, I would suggest.

A quick but relevant tangent to the blogs vs "real" journalism debate. Have just seen ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN again on the television. I haven't seen this for about ten years. And sure, its only a movie. But I defy anyone to watch it again and not feel really angry about how low journalistic standards - how low our cultural expectations - have gotten in a generation.

Not even Bob Woodward is Bob Woodward anymore.